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Interpreting His Malady

The author knows that soon he will wear his Parkinson’s “like a scarlet letter at all times.”

By

Nicholas Wade

Oct. 2, 2015 5:05 p.m. ET

Parkinson’s is a deceptive disease. It once seemed to have a simple cause—a shortage of the brain chemical dopamine—and a simple treatment: delivery of the dopamine-making chemical L-dopa to the patient’s brain. In 1999, Sen. Arlen Specter even predicted that the disease would be conquered in five years, and the government’s chief neuroscientist was rash enough to agree with him.

But the more that researchers have learned about the disease, the more complex they have found it to be. The symptoms that first bring patients...